Light Painting - Creating an Orb (Fun Project)

A Little bit of Knowledge...

Light painting is a pretty broad subject and it typically comes in two flavours: light painting which involves painting light onto a subject and another which involves using the light source to paint streaks of light.

These two techniques can be be used independently or together for effect. Light painting typically involves a long exposure and a hand held light that someone draws with. The person holding the light is normally moving too fast to be visible in the photo. A light orb is created by swinging a light source around in a vertical circular motion whilst slowly rotating.

This kind of photography requires either a very dark room or for it to be night time.

CH Photogs Style, what we did...

First of all, we had to get our hands om some lights. Some good, non expensive lights that we could swing around... without breaking the bank

What we ended up using was fairy lights from our local Chinese market. The lights themselves were cheap, 30 bucks to be exact, perfect for what we needed. The length of lights we opted for was 5 meters, and the LED's are multi coloured.

We now had to tie up the lights to create a single light ball at the end of the fairy light string. We left ourselves with about a meter to hold on to which we would swing around, and for tying them up... you guessed it, insulation tape :-)

The rest of the lights on the meter section we painted black so this would not be present in the exposure.

Camera Settings - What we used

For this exercise we used the following settings on our DSLR...

Aperture : f10

Shutterspeed : Bulb mode (we used a remote trigger)

ISO : 500

Focus was set to Manual

Last but not least, a Tripod is a must due to the long exposure.

The Final results

As you can see from our first attempts, not great... but we must admit, it's quite tricky to spin you body around whilst swinging your lights, not to mention trying to avoid getting a high five in the face with fairy lights.

The Final Two resulted in the best for our first attempt at this fun project. We are looking forward to revisiting this project and bettering our first attempt. We will be sure to post new results soon.

Please Share Yours!!

If you would like to share your attempts at creating an Orb, please feel free to share it Here

We will be publishing and sharing your uploads on our Facebook page. Good luck and looking forward to seeing yours!!